There's a cure for the dreaded disease “chaufferphobia” - the fear of becoming a taxi service. It's knowing the difference between selling and showing real estate.

Yes, new agent. Who better than you can help me get an idea of the area for when I retire in your town in five years? Rather than me riding around using my gas and needing a lot of information about an area, why don’t I call a local real estate office? Hopefully, I will find a new agent who doesn’t realize I am not going to buy anything.

The following is a true story about two real estate agents: Agent A and Agent B.

Agent A had been in the business about six months, but had no training.

Agent B had been in the business about 30 days, and also had no training.

Here’s what happened to these two:

Agent A had some prospects, but they had no idea "what they wanted or where they wanted to live” but when they saw the right house they would buy it on the spot. They wanted to buy a $400,000 home and had been prequalified for a mortgage. This was just too good to be true!

Agent A took them east of town one time, west of town the next. Before long she was picking them up at the airport when they came to town on weekends and was buying their lunch. After about two months the prospects narrowed their location down to either the east side or the north side of town, but weren’t sure if they wanted a golf course or waterfront home. But Agent A hung on because the commission was going to make it all worth it.

The prospects fell in love with Agent A. Agent A could do no wrong, and they reported this to the broker, who mentioned this in a sales meeting.

Agent A eventually ran out of places to show them, so they asked her to show her new home communities, some as far as 50 miles from the office. When she suggested they shop with someone else from there on, they were offended.

These buyers eventually bought a home, but not from Agent A. Agent A had to leave the business because she was broke and starving.

Agent B was on the floor when a caller said she was coming to town over Thanksgiving and wanted to buy a house while here. With few questions asked, and his excitement running amuck, Agent B asked her when they could meet.

That was his first mistake.

Agent B took a telephone call from a prospect that was coming to town on Thanksgiving Sunday afternoon and asked to be picked up at the train station. He spent Sunday afternoon going to the station, waiting on her to get off the train, and then calling her when she didn’t show up.

The prospect explained that she decided to ride up with her sister and apologized for not calling. (They always apologize.) They reset an appointment for 10 o’clock the next morning.

Question: how long do you think Agent B waited for this party Monday morning before he realized she was not coming in? Try all morning. But the party did call about 11 and reset the appointment for 2 pm.

Agent B showed them four houses that afternoon, none of which the prospect liked.

Pushed by his manager to qualify this buyer, Agent B finally asked a mortgage lender to call the prospect the next morning, only to find out they could not come close to qualifying for the price of any homes Agent B had shown the buyer.

Agent B swore that would never happen to him again, and it hasn’t. He decided that before a prospect gets in his car, they will be prequalified for a mortgage and will have some urgency to buy within 30 days. Within a few short months, his sales and listing production went from none to two to three a month.

How do you prequalify the buyer? Have your mortgage lender call them. It only takes a few minutes on the phone. If they were real prospects, why wouldn’t they agree to be prequalified?

The other option is to spend most of the day, maybe longer, driving people around in your clean car educating them on the area. If this is something you really enjoy doing, I would suggest you get a job that pays a salary or hourly rate at your local chamber of commerce.

Otherwise, learn how to prequalify the buyer, before you run out of gas.

Published: July 7, 2003

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David Fletcher has been a Florida real estate condominium and new homes broker for 30 years with more than $3 billion in new construction sales. In 2008, Keller Williams Realty International named him a "Lifetime Achiever." Along the way he has chaired the Florida Homebuilders Associaiton Sales and Marketing Council, trained thousands of general agents and on-site agents to work together, and was a featured speaker at the National Association of Realtors. Recently he founded New Homes Niche, a builder-certified co-broker training system "to meet the growing trend we see in short sale buyers moving to new homes for a lot of reasons." Call David at 407 234 2349, , and visit his website.